While the world parses the ramifications of the National Security Agencyâs massive snooping operation, itâs important to remember an earlier government attempt at data collection and, more important, how a group of hackers and activists banded together to stop it.
In the early 1990s, the military was petrified that encryption technologies would leave them blind to the growing use of mobile and digital communications, so they hatched a plan to ban to place a hardware patch that gave the NSA backdoor wiretap access, the so-called âClipper Chipâ.